The Internet has become a useful source of information relating to goods and services, but because so many users and companies are connected to the Internet and providing information of their own, it is difficult to find relevant information among all available information. One area of information is in recommendations. As individuals and groups are now able to connect to the Internet and retrieve information from websites and via apps, and do so perhaps while in transit towards a geographic area of interest, they come to expect the ability to find information about goods and services being offered.
One source of information is in the form of websites hosted by or for providers. As used herein, “website” refers to a collection of one or more web pages displayable by a browser or other web client, the one or more web pages being hosted on a web server (i.e., a computer coupled to the Internet, or other network over which communication occurs) that responds to requests for pages hosted thereon. An example might be a restaurant that generates information about its hours, pictures of its dining room, contact information, history, menus and other offerings, then puts that information into a suitable form (such as HTML pages, dynamically generated pages, etc.), stores those pages in electronic storage accessible by the web server (hosted by the restaurant or perhaps a company that specializes in web presence that provides such services to the restaurant), and then serves those pages as client devices request pages. The information might also be presented in another form, such as data supplied to an app on the client device rather than a generic browser on the client device.
However the restaurant gets the information to interested users, it is still limited to information sourced by that restaurant. A number of websites have been set up to collect information from other customers of a vendor of goods or services and provide reviews and comments and other details to other customers or potential customers. For example, there might be a website that focuses on hotels, another on restaurants, and another on home repair, or a general one. However, these websites might just have too much information to be useful to a user searching for relevant recommendations.
Additionally, with the increase of users participating in social media websites, users are also interested in getting information about their friends, and the opinions of their friends. For example, a user may find out that a number of their friends on a social media website highly recommend a restaurant, which may be more persuasive to that user than the recommendations of strangers or high rankings on general rating websites. Thus, social media websites that provide information to a user regarding the user's friends may also be another source that the user refers to in gathering information and searching for relevant recommendations. However, social media websites allow users to provide a wide variety of information that may or may not be related to what a user is searching for (e.g., status updates unrelated to a vendor of goods or services), and it is also difficult to cross-reference the recommendations of friends through social media websites with general websites providing reviews, or websites for particular businesses, in a user's search for relevant evaluations of recommended venues.
An improved evaluation system is desirable.